I’ve been tromping around in the Labors of Heracles and thinking about mythology. I’m not sure that myths mean anything. But since I’ve got a friend who’s interested in the psychology of Carl G. Jung, I read Jung’s essay “Approaching the unconscious.”
It’s the lead essay in Man and his Symbols, a book that includes essays by scholars who developed and expanded Jung’s ideas.
The part of Jung’s essay that interests me is a metaphor. Biology students learn about the evolution of bodies by studying embryos. They compare embryos of a fish to those of a mouse. They see in the porpoise’s fin something that resembles the human hand.
Jung says we need a comparative anatomy class for the psyche. He says we can learn by studying archetypes, the primordial images that the psyche produces naturally. This imagery comes up routinely in dreams.
One cannot afford to be naïve in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a threat of nature — a spirit of the beautiful and generous a well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies or the fables of the primeval forest than in the consciousness of modern man.
I like the ancient mythologies and the fables of the primeval forest. I’d like to think they will lead me to a better understanding of an earlier version of human beings, beings whose minds we can barely fathom because we, their descendants, have gained so much and lost so much since then.
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